Edward Morgan Forster was born in London on 1 January 1879. His father, an architect of Welsh origin, died of consumption about a year after his son's birth. Edward was brought up by his mother, Lily, who distinguished herself for her philanthropic activities, and by a paternal great-aunt, Marianne Thornton, whose biography he published in 1956. He was educated at Tonbridge School (“Sawston” in The Longest Journey) and King's College, Cambridge, and although his studies obviously made an impact on him, it was his travels that would later exert a true influence on his life. In 1906 he became a tutor to Syed Masood, an Indian Muslim patriot in whose company he traveled throughout India in 1912-13. He then revisited the country in 1921-22, working as a personal secretary for the maharajah of the native state of Dewas Senior. In A Passage to India, which was to be his last novel and remains one of the most widely read of English novels, the two communities confronting each other in India are the English and the Indians in the early 1920s.

An honorary fellow of King's College, Cambridge, he was also a member of the so-called Bloomsbury group, along with such writers as Virginia Woolf and Lytton Strachey, the art historians Clive Bell and Roger Fry, and the economist John Maynard Keynes. He is the author of six major novels, Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905), The Longest Journey (1907), A Room with a View (1908), Howard's End (1910), A Passage to India (1924), and Maurice, completed in 1914 but published posthumously in 1971; in addition to these, he published about fourteen other works, including two biographies; two books on Alexandria, the result of a period of time he spent there as a member of the Red Cross; a film script; and, together with Eric Crozier, the libretto for Benjamin Britten's opera Billy Budd. He is also the author of Aspects of the Novel (1927), a major contribution to literary theory. In spite of much acclaim for his creative achieve-

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